The present invention is related to industrial architecture and more specifically to support systems for tools and flooring in industrial cleanrooms.
Conventional industrial cleanrooms are used to house tools for semiconductor processing, pharmaceutical manufacturing, biotechnology product manufacturing, food processing and for other industrial uses. Within the cleanroom, a modular floor raised above a subfloor is used to easily allow services including electrical service and gases or liquids to be brought to tools used for the processing operation of the cleanroom or a related operation such as cleaning portions of other tools. Raised modular floors also provide ease of reconfiguration of the cleanroom.
Conventional raised modular floors have a limit on the weight they can support. The limit is the lesser of the limit of the material used for the flooring itself and the support members used to raise the modular floor, although both limits may be nearly the same or identical. If a tool to be placed on the raised floor exceeds the lower of these weight limits, the tool can break through the floor, or may simply bend the supports or flooring tiles, or may compress the flooring tiles, which are corrugated like cardboard and therefore subject to compression.
To avoid this problem, such a tool is not placed on the floor. Although the tool could be placed on the floor and the supports for that section of the floor could be increased, the fact that the tool could compress the corrugated floor would make it difficult to level the tool to the tolerances some tools require. Instead, the floor tiles are removed and some are possibly cut to leave a hole in the floor slightly smaller than the footprint of the tool. The tool is then supported by means of tripods or other supports that come into direct contact with the subfloor of the cleanroom. Because the raised floor around the cutout must be supported, a frame is built between the raised floor and the subfloor, just outside the perimeter of the hole in the raised floor. Additional floor supports may be used to provide additional support for the raised subfloor near the hole.
However, there are several problems with this approach. The frame and additional supports are costly to install. Furthermore, they impede access to the area under the tool, impeding the running of services to the tool or making them more difficult to install. The frame could be replaced by a separate set of supports for the raised floor, but these new supports combined with the supports required for the tool could together impede running of services to the tool.
Some tools are supplied with a ledger plate that can be bolted to the supports for these heavy tools and support the floor around the hole, eliminating the need for flooring or other supports. The ledger plate is a piece of angle iron which is a flat piece of metal (it need not be iron) bent in the shape of an xe2x80x98L xe2x80x99. To ensure that the floor supported in this fashion is highly level, and thereby avoid hazards to operators walking nearby the tool, these ledger plates are custom attached on site, either by drilling the ledger plate and support to allow precise bolting or by welding the ledger plate onto the support.
Although this arrangement solves the access problem of the frame, there are problems with this approach as well. The processes performed in cleanrooms are extremely sensitive to even the smallest amount of contamination. Thus, expensive containment procedures must be followed to install the ledger plates to the supports using the above procedures. In the event of an error, significant contamination from the drilling or welding processes may be introduced into the cleanroom, potentially contaminating several batches of materials in process and requiring an expensive and time consuming cleanup, during which time a portion of the cleanroom must be removed from service, adding additional expense to the process.
What is needed is a method and system for supporting a raised floor near a tool without requiring a frame and without drilling or welding the tool support.
A system and method supports at least a portion of a raised floor and at least a portion of a tool by adjusting a portion supporting the floor, and this portion may then be locked into place. A product may be produced using the tool.